On a warm spring night, in the small Jewish cemetery of
Zokof, Friedl Alterman is wakened from death. On the
ground above her crouches Itzik Leiber, a reclusive,
unbelieving fourteen-year-old whose fatal mistake has
spurred the town's angry residents to violence. The
childless Friedl rises to guide him to safety-only to find
she cannot go back to her tomb. Now Friedl is trapped in
that thin world between life and death, her brash decision
binding her forever to Itzik and his family: she is fated
to be forever restless, and he, forever haunted by the
ghosts of his past.

Years later, after Itzik himself has gone to his grave,
his son, Nathan, knows nothing of his bitter father's
childhood. When he begrudgingly goes to Poland on
business, Nathan decides on a whim to visit his ancestral
town. There, in Zokof, he meets the mysterious Rafael, the
town's last remaining Jew, who promises to pass on all the
things Itzik had failed to teach his son-about Zokof,
about his faith, and about himself.

And yet, like the generation before him, Nathan keeps what
he learns hidden inside himself. With the family legacy in
danger of being lost, Friedl's restless spirit guides
Itzik's precocious granddaughter, Ellen, on a journey of
her own to Zokof, where only Friedl can help Ellen unlock
the mysteries of her family's past-and only Ellen can help
Friedl break her agonizing enslavement.